Rtools questions

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 11-04-05 6:22 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:

Hello:


? ? ? ?1. ?How can I tell when the development version of Rtools has
changed?

I don't make announcements of the changes, you just need to check the web
site. ?There are online tools that can do this for you automatically, but I
don't know which one to recommend. ?Google suggests lots of them.

I also asked myself this before and I must admit it took me a while to
interpret the contents of the webpage. ?There are multiple sections,
e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2', 'Changes since R 2.11.1', 'Changes
since R 2.11.0', and so on. ?Then within each section there are some
dates mentioned. ?Given my current R version (say R 2.13.0 beta) and
Rtools (Rtools213.exe), it not fully clear to me which section to look
at, e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2'? ?It might be more clear if there
instead the sections would be 'Changes in Rtools213', 'Changes in
Rtools212' and so on, and within each maybe list updates by
dates/version. ?More like a NEWS file. ?Then it would be easier to see
if there is an updated available or not. ?Even a NEWS file only
available as part of the installation will help decide whether the
version you have installed differ from the one available online.
Something like the following:

== Changes in Rtools213 ==

[...]


== Changes in Rtools212 ==

2011-03-25:
- Rtools 2.12 has been frozen.
- We have updated all of the tools to current Cygwin versions as of
March 25, 2011. We added the "du" utility from Cygwin. We have dropped
Vanilla Perl. The libjpeg version has been updated to 8c, and libpng
has been updated to 1.5.1.

2010-10-18: [v2.12.0.1892] <== Is this an Rtools version?!?
- Prior to October 18, 2010, builds of Rtools212.exe did not correctly
install the "extras" required to build R. Version 2.12.0.1892 or later
should fix this.
- We have now updated all of the tools to current Cygwin versions, and
have updated the compilers, and included the 64 bit compilers into
Rtools. See Prof. Ripley's page for the details.
- Perl is rarely needed in R since R 2.12.0, so it is by default not installed.

2010-??-??:
- The 32 bit version of R-devel (to become R 2.12.0 in fall, 2010)
will be built with gcc 4.5.x, so Rtools212 contains a completely new
MinGW toolchain based on gcc 4.5.0.

== Changes in Rtools211 ==

[...]


Just a suggestion ...and thanks for providing Rtools!

/Henrik